Haier Group Corporation is a Chinese multinational home appliances and consumer electronics company headquartered in Qingdao, China. It designs, develops, manufactures, and sells products such as refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves, computers, and more. Haier is a very well-known brand, globally with a huge brand value. A weird yet interesting story was recently published on Asian media. A Chinese farmer complaint with Haier Electronics that a drainage pipe in his washing machine clogged constantly. Haier maintenance found that the farmer used the washing machine to wash sweet potatoes rather than cloth. Obviously, not the mission nor the use this machine was built for. This came as a surprise to Haier but further studies showed that many farmers in remote rural areas do the exact same thing. When the CEO of the Haier Group heard the news, he soon realized that this could be a big business opportunity. He decided to invest in the development of a washing machine with a very big draining outlet that could be used to wash clothes as well as vegetables. The new model was even priced at an affordable price and the first units manufactured, targeted at rural areas, were immediately sold out.
This is Business development at its best.
A seemingly bizarre opportunity allows a product destined for a given market to be sold to a completely different market, one that was not marked at all as possible, and to allow the company, taking the necessary actions of course, to generate sales to a whole new world and produce a substantial non-organic growth jump.
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